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Heya,

I'm about to build myself new DAW (yay!). I was thinking to go on AMD64 sounds great..eh? the story changes once you check about motherboards that support socket 754 (AMD64 ver); it appears that only VIA chipset is currently supporting socket 754...weird, because i was expecting for more chipsets to integrate such as like: nForce2/3 or Intel...

So meantime i can't grab AMD64 just because of the frustrating fact that the only motherboards that suppoert socket 754 are VIA chipset based motherboards (Suck).

Do you think more chipsets will be integrated into the AMD64 scene? should i wait a while? or perhaps AMD64 was made to work only with VIA chipset?? (doesn't even make sense)

frustrating..

I was under the impression there was also a Nforce3 board out aswell. As far as VIA goes, im pretty sure the issues with the PCI bandwidth on that chipset is a thing of the past. I cant be sure though

Cheers!

I can't be sure either.
Can someone reveal some light about it?

Well, U Audio recommends the VIA K8T800 based Athlon64 boards for DAW's...

But there's (of course) more:

NVIDIA nForce3 (150/ 250)
============================
- AOpen AK89 Max
- Biostar K8NHA Pro
- Biostar K8NHA-M
- Chaintech ZNF3-250 Zenith
- GigaByte GA-K8N
- GigaByte GA-K8N Pro
- GigaByte GA-K8NNXP
- Leadtek K8N
- Shuttle AN50R
- Soyo K8NF3

ALI M1687
============================
- Soyo K8USA Dragon Ultra

SIS 755
============================
- Asrock K8S8X
- Elitegroup 755-A
- Elitegroup 755-A 2

but do they have socket 754 for Athlon64?

The ASUS K8V Deluxe (my mobo) is VIA K8T800 chipset.. runs beautifully, and I havent had any issues with the PCI.. so far..

All boards I posted are socket 754

Aye, Which one would u considered to be most reliable?

Sorry, don't know - I use an Opteron with AMD chipset...

But all in all, the Soyo Dragon, Leadtek and most Asus boards should be high quality - I think I would suggest to check the Leadtek (I had a Nforce 2 board, fast and rock-solid).

There's one thing you should know about the AMD64 CPU's: the chipset is not as important as with Intel or previous AMD systems. AMD calls AMD64 chipsets "tunnel", since a lot of the typical chipset stuff is now hadled by the CPU; and bandwith is pretty much a non issue on AMD64...

sounds great man !

yeah..
anyway..so it seems like i'll prolly go on the Asus K8VDX mobo...

After more reading about the subject, i have some questions to ask:

1. Should i wait for socket 939, which on one hand will support dual channel memory controller, on the other hand, will support reduced L2 cache of AMD64 (AMD want to downgrade back to 512KB L2 Cache in order to make their chip cheap again. So should i wait for socket 939? or go now for the socket 754

2. Do you know if windows 64bit XP will support AMD Athlon64? could i install winxp 64bit?

3. Are you aware of the weird romur that Asus K8VDX Motherboard has some prob: in the BIOS there is the Turbo setting - which if you play with, will corrupt your SATA harddrive information - now I wouldn't want that to happen ever! can someone tell more about it? Also seems like Abit KV8-MAX3 comes with more extras, cool tweaking stuff...also got rid of all the stupid uneeded lpt and com ports. has some new cooling solution for the receptors.

4. Been told that Seagate SATA Drivers have Native Sata, their original SATA Method which works much better than all other emulated SATA Drivers..what do you think?


Cheers,

1.) Well, it will take another while 'till 939 becomes available...
But, if you want to have a reliable upgrade-path, buy a single or dual Opteron board. It's not that expensive, but AMD will keep socket 940 for the Opteron, and a dual-core socket 940 Opteron will become available next year - using the same chipsets (ie, buy a MSI Master FAR2, Gigabyte or Tyan K8W board with a single Opteron, upgrade to two Opterons if you need more power, and you can still upgrade to dual-core Opterons next year (for 4 CPU's)).
The Opteron has the most efficient multiprocessor design available today, each CPU increases the performance by 70 to 95 percent (not 30-70 percent like the AthlonMP or P4 Xeon. And dual-core != HyperThreading).

2. Yes, it will become available sometime this year, and was designed for AMD64.

3. Don't know about that. But if you really want a reliable system, go Opteron - if it's good enough for mission-critical servers, it should be well suited for a DAW...

4. If you want to use SATA, get a true, native SATA HDD. (It's all SCSI for me... )

Hope this helps...

Thanks for the info.
Opteron is not exctly something i could efford. I'm limited with cash. need to spend it really wisly. as far as i can go is AMD Athlon64 3200+ not behind. and i think its fair enough as for daw.